Pierre Cartier

Pierre Émile Cartier (10 June 1932 – 17 August 2024) was a French mathematician. An associate of the Bourbaki group and at one time a colleague of Alexander Grothendieck, his interests have ranged over algebraic geometry, representation theory, mathematical physics, and category theory.

Life and career Cartier was born on 10 June 1932. He studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris under Henri Cartan and André Weil. After his 1958 thesis on algebraic geometry, he worked in a number of fields. He is known for the introduction of the Cartier operator in algebraic geometry in characteristic p, and for work on duality of abelian varieties and on formal groups. He is the eponym of Cartier divisors and Cartier duality.

From 1961 to 1971, he was a professor at the University of Strasbourg. In 1970 he was an Invited Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Nice. He was awarded the 1978 Prize Ampère of the French Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Cartier died in Marcoussis on 17 August 2024, at the age of 92.

Publications (1st edition 1969) (1st edition 1992)

Freedom in Mathematics, Springer India, 2016 (with Cédric Villani, Jean Dhombres, Gerhard Heinzmann). Translation from the French language edition: Mathématiques en liberté, La Ville Brûle, Montreuil 2012. Pierre Cartier: Alexander Grothendieck. A country known only by name. Notices AMS, vol. 62, 2015, no. 4, pp. 373–382, PDF.

As editor (1st edition 1990)